Razer planning a smartphone for hardcore gamers

Razer is said to be planning its own mobile phone, designed to cater for its audience of "hardcore gamers", according to sources talking to Bloomberg.

The "people familiar with the matter" don't reveal anything in the way of details when it comes to the form that this mobile device will take, but instead reports that Razer will target a stock market launch in Hong Kong looking for a valuation of $3-5 billion.

This would give the company a war chest to develop its own smartphone offering.

The company recently acquired Nextbit, the smartphone startup that put an emphasis on unlimited storage by using integrated cloud backup and syncing and, although Nextbit at the time confirmed it would continue to develop in the mobile sphere, it's likely that this will have some influence on the direction that a Razer phone will take.

There's also the Ouya acquisition from 2015, when Razor scooped up the Android gaming device, which may also play into a final device positioning.

To appeal to gamers, we can't help feeling that the offering needs to extend beyond offering an Android phone with powerful hardware as whatever Razer produced would be matched by big players like Samsung. The real key will be finding something unique, beyond just design, to give the Razer phone life.

The IPO isn't expected until October 2017, so a Razer phone might be some way off.